First Listen - Chris Tomlin's And If Our God Is For Us...!

My initial impressions for Chris Tomlin's And If Our God Is For Us... can be summarized as such:

And If Our God Is For Us... > Hello Love

but

And If Our God Is For Us... < See The Morning < Arriving


That's not to say that AIOGIFU (sorry, album title too long) isn't a great album. It is. But at first listen, it doesn't quite reach the heights that Tomlin's earlier albums attained (less Hello Love, which I really had zero emotional attachment to).

AI (sorry, acronym too long) is a hodgepodge of downright brilliant songs like the opening track Our God (the title of the album is the first line of the bridge) - which was also performed on the 'live' Passion album Awakening - and pleasant but somewhat ho-hum tunes like Lovely.

If you liked Our God on the Passion album you'll love it here. Tomlin has given it the full choir + strings treatment, and it comes off sounding way grander than I could ever have imagined.

There's a superb duet with Christy Nockels - Faithful - and a song that smells like an instant classic to me - All To Us (it might just be the next How Great Is Our God, a song that's sung to death because it's so widely loved. Kinda like getting smothered to death by a hug.)

However, the one song that I couldn't get out of my head for days after I heard the album was the very pop-rock I Will Follow, replete with drum loops and falsetto vocal riffs (think One Republic).

The album closer is Awakening, which was the title track of the Passion album. I was mildly disappointed here because this song had such excellent potential to be the hugest, baddest, meanest final track on the album had it been given the Our God treatment. Sadly, no soaring strings = no super last song. It's still nice, but I kinda think the Passion version sounds nicer because it had 30,000 people singing along.

As is requisite for any Chris Tomlin album, there are a handful of upbeat numbers on AI. Same thing, I don't think they're bad, in fact they're pretty good, but just not great. No Chains On Me is a declaration of freedom, but it doesn't quite compare to insta-classics like Your Grace Is Enough (on Arriving) or the awesome Let God Arise (on See The Morning).

I shall be critical for now and give A (too lazy to type 2 letters!):

Stay tuned for my final review! In the meantime, here's the super super super super super version of Our God:




And here's No Chains On Me: